Teen texts friends she’s being followed, disappears

South Carolina police hunt for 16-year-old last seen taking cash from bank after vanishing on first day of school.

“We don’t know if it’s true, but she did send that text,” Jayson Spindler said of the cryptic message, which his daughter sent to a group of friends shortly after dining with them at a restaurant last Thursday. South Carolina police are hunting for a 16-year-old high schooler who vanished Thursday on her way to her first day of junior year, her matching lunchbox and backpack in tow. According to police, Marley told friends she was going to pick up a 22-year-old man — identified only as “Jeremy” — to drive him to his home in the Garden City Beach area before heading to school. “The investigation so far has revealed that she left her friends at breakfast on the morning of the 20th, driving her car, to reportedly pick up a friend named Jeremy who was drunk on the [Ocean] Boulevard,” Lieutenant Raul Denis of the Horry County Police Department said in a statement on Monday. When Marley’s father called her mobile phone about 4pm Thursday, a clerk with the Ocean Reef Resort answered and said the phone had been found earlier in the day in the hotel’s parking lot.

After breakfast, the teen — who got her driver’s license just two weeks before she vanished — drove her 2002 Ford Escape to a local bank, surveillance video showed. On Tuesday, police released surveillance images taken the morning Marley disappeared that show the teen at her bank, where she withdrew a small amount of money from her account.